I’ve never been in a room full of so many millionaires, and there were several hundred. I went to Sotheby’s last night, and it was my first auction. Cezanne’s Nature Morte Aux Fruits et Pot de Gingembre sold for $33 million, the highest price paid that evening. Toward the end of bidding for the painting, bids
jumped by increments of $500,000. Witnessing this made me dizzy, but the spell – and the silence – was finally broken when the auctioneer banged his hammer, which looked like a wooden pawn, and he didn’t so much bang it as stamp the podium with it.
The whole bidding process was confusing at first. There was no countdown, no “going once, twice, sold!” Instead, the auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, slowed down a bit – as much as an auctioneer can slow down – when the price got higher and, in his German-colored posh British accent, said things like “Are we all done at $15 million?” or “I shall sell it then” or “Fair warning, last chance.” He seemed to have about a dozen of these phrases, which he combined in every conceivable way to give the bidders a few extra seconds to decide – and then, somehow unexpectedly, BANG! The “hammer” came down and it was time for the next lot.
Eighty-three Impressionist and Modern Art works were sold, many of which were by German and French artists, which required proper pronunciations of the names of paintings by Schiele, Beckmann, Monet, Renoir, etcetera. The auctioneer, wearing a tux with a large, black bowtie, even pronounced “Picasso” with a French accent. This seemed a bit much. After all, Picasso was Spanish – admittedly, he did spend a lot of time in Paris.
Some bids came in over the phone from who knows where and who knows who. Undeniably, a certain mystery surrounds events like these, but so does a certain desire to “make a fashion statement,” as one elderly British journalist wearing a pink tie put it after the show (I overheard the conversation). Amedeo Modigliani’s Le Fils Du Concierge
sold for nearly $28 million, but Egon Schiele’s Stehender Mannlicher Ruckenakt sold for a measly $650,000. I happen to love the latter piece, but I couldn’t help but wonder why it sold for the price that it did. In fact, why did any painting sell for the price that it did? There is no one answer of course: There are trends among buyers – one year it’s early Impressionism, next year it’s German Expressionism – and some buyers view their purchase as a stock purchase, something they hope will appreciate in value. There are also those people who truly love art and are willing to pay anything for it, and this does create a type of “inflation.”
But outside of these reasons lies a hackneyed, yet important, question, and it was chafing me the entire time I was at Sotheby’s: What does it say about art when something that is supposedly priceless is given a price and sold like an expensive slave? I think it cheapens art and gives us a false measuring stick. A few years ago, Meyer, the auctioneer at Sotheby’s, sold Picasso’s Garcon a la Pipe (Boy with a Pipe)
for $104 million – $34 million more than the estimated price. At the time, it was the most expensive painting ever sold, but what does that mean? What does the price have to do with the painting as a work of art? I’m not asking the question rhetorically, but I’m wondering how the art auction world, where prices can go up by $100,000 per second during bidding, has changed how we look at art.
I admit it was exciting to watch prices leap like mad cheetahs, but the excitement was short lived. It was a delight to see so many beautiful works of art by Rodin, Picasso, Chagall and others, but I couldn’t forget the prices associated with each of their works, at least not right away. Good news: twenty-four hours later, the prices are already starting to become hazy… The fog should roll in soon.
